Feminist to Know: Christina Sharpe

Christina Sharpe is a leading Black feminist scholar, cultural theorist, and author whose work has significantly shaped Black studies, feminist theory, and critical race thought. Her scholarship examines the lasting impacts of slavery and anti-Blackness, offering frameworks for understanding Black life and imagining liberation.

Born and raised in Pennsylvania, Sharpe’s early experiences with systemic racism and her family’s emphasis on community resilience deeply influenced her work. Today, she is currently a professor in the Department of Humanities at York University in Toronto, where she mentors students and challenges traditional academic boundaries through her interdisciplinary teaching and research.

Sharpe is best known for her 2016 book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, which introduced “wake work,” a framework exploring how the afterlives of slavery shape Black life, death, and survival. This widely taught text has become a cornerstone in Black studies. In some of her more recent work, she has looked at the Equal Justice Initiative’s soil collection project – an effort to memorialize those killed in anti-Black lynchings through the collection of soil from known lynching locations – as a form of “wake work.” Her earlier book, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010), explores how the legacies of slavery persist in intimate and cultural relationships.

Sharpe’s scholarship emphasizes mourning, witnessing, and care in the face of ongoing violence. As she writes in In the Wake: “Care is the antidote to violence. But it is not the same thing as a lack of violence; care requires more from us.”